Is it licit to blame Umberto Eco if a group of young people has drawn inspiration from one
of his novels, fostering chaos in the media and promoting blasphemous cults?
Imagine that the things depicted in Foucault's
Pendulum escape from literary fiction and infect sick brains.
Fictional strategies continue working and mix reality and fantasy in an
amoral disorder. In Italy and the rest of Europe, an obscure and delirious
Internet youth movement called Luther Blissett
are increasing their influence; they seem to have turned Foucault's
Pendulum and Eco's philosophy into the Holy Writings of a "pop"
"subversive" anti-media religion, a life-size role play with
the tradition of hesoterism.. An anonymous pamphlet titled Umberto
Eco's multiple name started to circulate recently. It aims
at exposing the underhand dealings and connections with Italy's left-wing
milieux which shaped the project, revealing the likely involvement of Eco
himself in the scam and calling him a "master of deception",
accomplice of the Intelligentia's hesoteric-gnostic activities. .

L'Espresso,
a big italian information magazine, once described Luther Blissett as "an
extraordinary mix of the Internet and the Knight Templars". Nowadays
the collective imagination has completely merged with the media and the
show-biz, and these descriptions cannot come as as surprises anymore. Consider
that "Luther Blissett" originally was the name of an AC
Milan soccer player! But who
or what is Luther Blissett these days? He is famous for several hoaxes
pulled on the TV and the press; he is a mass-media spectre whose
legend has been constructed as that of a pop star who may be impersonated
by anyone. Luther Blissett is a multiple name,
that is a name which everyone is exhorted to adopt and spread, a collective
character which some young people are using as a Trojan horse in order
to infiltrate popular culture, using his reputation to foster apocalyptic
cults, rave parties, radical "performance art" and a huge amount
of World Wide Web activism. Their plans are definitely subversive: a semiological
guerrilla against the media which has a plenty of coincidences
with Eco's theories. Who knows what the author of *The Name Of The Rose*
is thinking about his kinship with the mysterious creature... So long he
played with the fanta-occult that he got involved in it as a protagonist.

The maze of news and rumours
is endless and baffling, and curiosity demands understanding. On 26 May
1997 even Der Spiegel, the German
weekly magazine, covered Blissett's activities in Germany and explicitly
cited Umberto Eco as one of the forerunners of the project. The whole matter
is made even more complex by the usual conspiracy
theories, both right-wing and left-wing. Is this nothing more
than conspiracy paranoia? The authors of the pamphlet wonder too. Is this
a mere journalistic mystery story? We had better be circumspect and go
for understatements. After all Eco seems to have become the primadonna
in the salons of the left-wing intelligentsia, as well as a compulsory
(and resigned) target of any rumour. In the springtime of 1997 he's even
been charged with being nothing other than the Antichrist,
which caused a sensation in many Italian newspapers. Moreover, after the
deaths of Gianni Versace and Princess Di, we are witnessing a massive revival
of conspiracy-spotting in the newspapers. At the end of the day we still
have to find out who is concealing himself behind the initials K.M.A.,
the only signature on the pamphlet. K.M.A. promises to reveal himself at
an opportune time.

On this website you will find
a summary of the story of the pamphlet, the complete Italian text of the
latter and an English abstract of its content, as well as links to the
most famous Blissett- and Eco-related websites. The site is open to interaction:
you may leave your comment on the guestbook page. For any further information,
proposal and request you can e-mail to Andrea
Ridolfi - ridolfi_andrea@geocities.com

It is up to you to judge the clues
and coincidences scattered in this story: in Eco's life and works, in the
vicissitudes of the pamphlet and in the galaxy of "avant-garde"
movements. Here is the case. What is your solution?